[levlhed]

Hello,
I am looking for some advise while I am in the planning/design stage of my home theater/listening room.
The main speakers at the moment will be a pair of VMPS Super Tower/R 's These are the biggest cabinets I've ever seen.  The cabinets measure a little over 4 feet high and about 21" wide by 16" deep.  Each cabinet as a 15" down-firing passive radiator (inside the bottom, you can't see it) a 15" woofer, a 12" mid-bass, 2- 5" mids, 2- 1" dome tweeters, a 2" planar tweeter and a top-firing tweeter (not sure of size). that's essentially 9 speakers per cabinet! They can be bi-amped (separate amps for highs/lows), and also have adjustments for the highs on the front.

I've been wondering how to make use of a space that we'd been planning to make a walk in closet.  It's a sort of "nook" area that happens to run almost the full width of what will be the HT room.  This happens to be the wall that will be the FOH (front of house) with the main L/R/C speakers and the TV.   The space is a little over 3' deep and about 11' wide.  It has the (never used!) sump pump on one end.
We'd planned on drywalling it off and putting a door on the sump pump end to make it a walk in closet.
My wife asked if we could actually make "built ins" for the huge VMPS speakers (which I still may or may not use), creating recesses deep/wide enough to slide them in and making them flush with the front wall.  I have no idea if this is good/bad in audiophile terms!  I know I won't really have enough space to pull any FOH speakers far enough away from the front wall anyway, but something tells me doing this opens a whole different can of worms.
Does anyone have any theories as to why/why not to do something like this?  It would be nice to be able to sink those beasts back into the wall like that if there were no real down-sides to it.

Any ideas on how to best use that space for more than a closet in the HT?

It just seems like a handy sort of area to be able to do something really useful, but I can't really come up with what!
I snapped a couple pics with my cell phone to help you all visualize the space.  (please never mind the mess)

[oneinthepipe]

Not a good idea.  The speakers shouldn't be close to the front wall or the corners.  You'll have boomy and muddy bass and muddy midrange and a lot of reflections from the side walls.  Also, having a solid mass on either side of or between the speakers that is anywhere near parallel with the fronts of the speakers will interfere with dispersion. 

I think you should use the space for some enormous built-in bass traps.  Regardless, the speakers need to away from the front wall and corners. 

If you post your room dimensions or a drawing or more photos thereof, you should get some practical advise.

[bpape]

Agreed.  Speakers that are not designed to be used inwall shouldn't be built in like that.  What happens is the entire wall becomes the front speaker baffle which will completely change their response characteristics and defeat any baffle step compensation designed into the xover.  This isn't even considering the fact that you have a down-firing sub that would absolutely resonate any cavity like crazy.

If you want to use the space and not see the speakers and still have it perform well, build a false wall with just framing and cover with no drywall but just acoustically transparent cloth like Guilford of Maine FR7010-2100 series.  We do this all the time in home theaters.  For isolation purposes, you'll still want to frame and drywall the balance of the nook area - just not the front wall.

Bryan

[levlhed]

Thanks for the reassurance.  I kind of figured it would be a bad idea!
And I know that the speakers should be pulled further from the walls, but I've only got so much room to work with.  Honestly I'm still trying to decide if it's good-crazy or bad-crazy to try and use the monster towers for this room. 
The dimensions of the room could be about 16' long, 14' wide and about 7.5' ceiling.  That does not include that little nook area.
The nook adds another 3 feet in length, but does not go quite the full width.  I will still probably keep it as a walk-in closet area and I suppose it'd make an ideal space for some of the equipment (possibly an HTPC/etc)  My measurements are approximate as I haven't fully laid it out nor figured in the wall material thickness/etc.  Still in the planning/design stage but need to be in the building stage in a bout a month!

How could I utilize the nook/closet space for bass traps?  What would that entail?
I have a good deal of freedom to design this in the best way my budget allows, so I'm very open to at least learning what is possible and the potential benefits of doing so.